Yale Refuses to Rename Residential College Named For a White Supremacist

Yale has responded to decades of student protests calling for the university to rename a residential college named for John C. Calhoun by saying that it will not be doing so.

Calhoun served as vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. He was also a white supremacist. The New York Times reports that an online petition circulated last fall asking Yale to change the name, garnering 1,500 signatures. On Wednesday, Yale president Peter Salovey announced that Calhoun College will maintain its name.

A press release by the university states that renaming it “could have the effect of hiding the legacy of slavery.” Salovey added that retaining the name reflects the importance of confronting, teaching, and learning from our history.

The school will be adding two new residential college, which will be named for Anna Pauline Murray and Benjamin Franklin. Murray is a Yale University graduate from 1965 who went on to become a legal scholar and civil rights activist. She will be the first African American and the first woman Yale honors with a name.

Franklin, on the other hand, was a slaveowner before getting involved in the abolitionist movement. Salovey said he’s also the “personal hero and role model” of Charles B. Johnson, who made a $250 million donation to pay for the two buildings—the largest donation in Yale’s history.

Yale’s Black Student Alliance called Murray’s honor a “long-overdue first step towards creating a better and more inclusive Yale,” while retaining the name of Calhoun College “is a regression.”

Dear CEOs, Those Campus Racism Protests May Be Coming to Your Office

As the #BlackLivesMatter campus protests have swept across some 60 colleges nationwide, American students, especially the most liberal ones, are being criticized for their intolerance of free speech. Recent data show that 43% of incoming freshmen in 2015 thought it should be a college’s right to ban extreme speakers; 71% supported prohibitions against racist and sexist speech.

Unfortunately, critics are fixating on tactics and ignoring the fundamental issue: Students are protesting institutional racism. Focusing only on the students’ unwillingness to engage in dialogue with those who offend them ignores the reason for the surge of student activism — the use of racial slurs and swastikas and other acts that create an environment of intolerance.

As an African American sociology professor at a predominantly white university, I’ve found my students quite attentive to racial issues and hear them talk frequently about how they can disrupt inequalities. But context matters. The university where I work is one where administrators, faculty and students openly and routinely discuss issues of privilege and inequality and how to address them. That, sadly, is not always the case — on campuses or in corporate settings.

A stacked system

To understand the student reactions, you must evaluate them in the context of a system stacked against people of color who are underrepresented at most levels — and certainly the most influential ones. Collective action is likely the best avenue for them to be heard and actually effect change.

In a study of the racial attitudes of white college students, sociologists Joe Feagin and Leslie Houts Picca found that behind closed doors, white students often deal in racial slurs and stereotypes — feelings that then spill over into interactions on campus and the treatment of fellow students.

This is the college environment in which many students of color are asked to live — and try to succeed, even though research also shows that many teachers have no expectation they will.

In that context, is it reasonable to expect them to engage in polite discussion with the very people who are reinforcing the bigotry? Is it surprising that they lose patience with the students, professors, and administrators whose actions seek to marginalize them?

What does this mean for corporate leaders?

The next context within which these students will confront racism is apt to be the professional workplace. Some of the critiques students raise about their environments at predominantly white colleges and universities will likely reverberate in corporate, almost always predominantly white companies. There, they may well experience much of the same racial stereotyping, isolation and lack of regard for racial issues.

At work, although the culture may be equally inhospitable, stakes are higher and receptivity to collective action is usually lower. It may be harder for employees of color to demand institutional change when they risk losing their livelihood, and when they may be even fewer in number than they were at their colleges.

Researching black professionals and emotional performance at work, I found that many African American workers were so aware of their heightened visibility that they stringently monitored their emotions and reactions. They said they were held to different standards than their white peers and often were careful never to express anger or irritability, lest they evoke ugly racial stereotypes.

But the younger generation may be less likely to follow this script — and more likely to challenge it. These future graduates have already shown a willingness to take on institutions to make them more hospitable and sensitive to racial issues. If employers welcome them, these young workers could prove to be valuable partners in the effort to establish the racial diversity and tolerance that still elude America’s largest companies.

Adia Harvey Wingfield is a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. She specializes in research that examines how race, gender, and class affect social processes at work.

The Yale School of Management made a wise decision when it chose to accept Indra Nooyi to one of its master’s degree programs in 1978.

Now chairman and CEO at PepsiCo pep, Nooyi has become the school’s largest ever graduate benefactor, the school said Tuesday. The distinction accompanied news that Nooyi had endowed the deanship of the school in what the school described as “a landmark gift.” Yale did not disclose the sum.

Nooyi, who is also No. 2 on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list, has donated more to the school than any other alumni in terms of lifetime giving, the school said. With the donation, she also becomes the first woman to endow a top business school’s deanship.

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“My gift to this wonderful institution pales in comparison with the gift that Yale gave me—the fundamental understanding that leadership requires an expansive worldview and a deep appreciation of the many points of intersection between business and society,” the class of ’80 graduate said in a statement.

“My most ardent hope is that this endowment will teach future generations of leaders that the most successful companies of tomorrow will do more than make money,”Nooyi said. “They will make a difference and create shareholder value by improving the quality of life in every market in which they operate.”

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Nooyi previously contributed funding to other school projects as well. She made donations to help build a new hall and to dedicate classrooms, one of which bears her name in recognition. She has also served on the university’s governing board, known as the Yale Corporation, since 2002.

Edward A. Snyder, who has led the Yale School of Management since 2011 and was recently named to another 5-year term, has become the school’s first Indra K. Nooyi Dean.

“Indra Nooyi has become a leading voice among Fortune 500 CEOs in no small part because of her willingness to take a stand on the broader purpose of the corporation, while delivering top-echelon performance,” he said in a statement.

The Surprising Obstacle Mizzou and Yale Face in Increasing Diversity

Last week, the president of the University of Missouri resigned amid student protests that he had not done enough to address racist incidents on campus. At Yale University, hundreds of students are protesting the university administration’s failure to create a welcoming and safe environment for minority students. Similar protests are erupting across the country at institutions, such as Claremont McKenna College, Weslyan University, and Ithica College.

Students want answers, and one common solution that student protestors are asking for is to increase the diversity of their faculties by hiring more women and minority professors. In deciding whether to accede to these demands, the relevant university administrators will face a crucial test of their integrity and their commitment to the rule of law; specifically, their commitment to ensure that their institution does not violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

To understand why, you must ignore anything you have heard about the Supreme Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, which held that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment allows public universities to consider an applicant’s race in their admission decisions. That decision is irrelevant to the question of whether universities can consider race and gender in deciding whom to hire as faculty. Employment decisions are governed by the Civil Rights Act, which applies to both public and private universities.

The Civil Rights Act permits universities to undertake strenuous affirmative action to assemble the most diverse pool of applicants possible. They may specifically recruit African-Americans, women, and other minorities to apply for faculty positions. But once the applicant pool has been assembled and the selection process has begun – once the search committee begins compiling its list of candidates for further consideration — deciding whom to put on the short list for on-campus interviews, and ultimately, whom to hire – the Civil Rights Act prohibits basing any decision on the candidate’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Although the student demonstrators are unlikely to be aware of this aspect of the Civil Rights Act, university administrators certainly are. Their integrity is on the line in how they respond to students.

Will they truthfully tell the student protestors that the law does not permit the university to simply go out and hire minority faculty – that the Civil Rights Act prohibits them from making such race-based hiring decisions?

Will they attempt to fudge the matter by making a commitment to employ every available legal means to increase the diversity of their faculty? If so, will they explain to students that because almost every university already does this, such a promise does not commit the university to doing anything new?

Or will they go ahead and make a promise to hire more minority faculty without mentioning the restrictions of the Civil Rights Act? If so, and if they intend to keep that promise, then it is not the administrators’ integrity that is in question, but their commitment to the rule of law.

Most university administrators know that the legal limitations on diversity hiring can be easily circumvented. Faculty search committees are composed, not of employment lawyers, but of ordinary professors who are unfamiliar with the workings of the Civil Rights Act. Most of these professors believe that there is nothing legally wrong with giving preference to women and minorities in the selection process. Many universities exploit this ignorance of the law by generating memoranda governing faculty hiring that studiously refrain from acquainting the members of search committees with the legal restrictions of the Civil Rights Act, while exhorting them to use their utmost efforts to advance the goal of achieving a diverse faculty.

When the Civil Right Act was first passed, bigoted employers removed the “whites only” requirement from their job ads, but continued to give hiring preference to whites over African-Americans. They simply indulged their racial preferences covertly rather than overtly. The bigoted employers’ response to the Civil Rights Act was to go on acting in the way that they believed to be right regardless of the law. Present day universities frequently employ the same tactic to achieve what they consider to be the more desirable goal of diversity.

Should they? Increasing the diversity of a university’s faculty is a laudable end, but circumventing the law to achieve it on the ground that the end justifies the means sets a troubling precedent. At the University of Missouri, student demonstrators used force and the threat of force to prevent journalists from exercising their First Amendment rights on public property. At Yale, student demonstrators shouted obscenities and spat upon professors and others who disagreed with their position. If the end really does justify the means, what grounds are there for condemning such actions?

Universities are educational institutions. The way their administrators respond to the demand to hire more minority faculty will teach important lessons about both what it means to act with integrity and the importance of the rule of law. It will be interesting to see what those lessons are.

John Hasnas is a professor of ethics at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.